ghosts

Revisiting his old ways, Stephen King’s newest novel, Joyland has the heart of that disenchanted college youth you once were and the fun you were bound to have in spite of your looming shortcomings.Joyland is a quick read that ticks you slowly up the top of that rickety rollercoaster just to plummet you headfirst into unseen curves and humps. A nostalgic ride through a lost summer, a first love, a mysterious new place and the sweat of a summer job, King haunts you with things you’ve tried to forget and then those things you yearn to remember.

The pains of adolescence are well known by everyone. The struggle to find one’s self and be accepted by their peers is usually one of the most harrowing events in growing up. JG Faherty’s, The Cold Spot, illustrates the vulnerability of youth and the manipulation of death with unnerving detail and motivation.

Left on the roadside by their wayward and absconding mother, Delphine Dodd realizes this time is not like the others. She and her little sister, Olive, have been discarded on the side of the road like trash, only to find themselves floating aimlessly into the care of their unfamiliar grandmother. Set in the early settlement years before the First World War, S.P Miskowski weaves Delphine’s vivid recollections of her adolescence into a haunting dreamscape.

“The Others” is a film I have heard mentioned in several discussions on the shape of narrative cinema over the passed decade. And while I did see the film upon its initial release I never much had the urge to revisit it. I remember enjoying the experience but not quite recalling anything particularly extraordinary about it. However, revisiting the film 10 years after its release it is easy to see the potential and foresight displayed here.

I had a pretty scary roommate once. Guy had a tendency to lock himself in his room and watch conspiracy theory videos he downloaded off of the internet for hours on end. He duct taped newspaper over his bedroom windows. There were two separate occasions where he broke down laughing uncontrollably in the shower. He played “DOOM” almost every waking hour. Oh, and he also loved Alanis Morrissette. Like I said, creepy dude. And unfortunately for the filmmakers behind 2010’s import horror flick, “The Roommate”, he was way creepier than anything in this film.

I’m a “glass is half full” kind of guy. I try to find the positive side of everything in my life. For example, when I was recently dumped via text message, I rationalized it by being grateful that it saved me a trip across town to have that conversation in person. When I was recovering from surgery this Summer and couldn’t drink for two months, I considered it a perfect opportunity to save some money and drop some pounds. That said, I can’t find anything positive about this movie.

Horror films need a set of rules. Given all the insane, supernatural things that occur in them, the viewers need to know what can and can’t happen in the film’s universe so that they can properly react to what they are viewing. For example, we know that in “Evil Dead II” the dead are raised by the incantation of a passage from an ancient text and that the only way they can be stopped is for another passage from the book to be read aloud.